The invisible wall

So many places have an invisible wall. You can't see it, it's not mapped in any book, no one can tell you where it is, but it's there. It's definitely there. And knowing about it can make your life as a traveller so much more interesting.

In Bangkok, I stay on Khao San Road. It's the tourist epicentre; full of tall skinny Germans with dreadlocks, Argentinian road warriors wearing elephant-print harem pants, drunken Mancs on a night out. And also full of budget hotels, which are, generally, pretty clean and pretty reasonable to deal with, which is why I stay there. But it's touristy, and tasteful it ain't.

But it's surrounded by an invisible wall. If you walk a few blocks in any direction you will find it; or rather, you will pass through this permeable membrane, and find yourself in another Bangkok entirely.

Wat Chana Songkram is a minute's walk from Khao San Road. Here, at seven in the morning, old men come to sit in the aisles of the temple and read their newspapers. Thai women cook in the open-air kitchen, preparing the monks' breakfasts, each plate identically turned out with a curled fish, a dollop of rice, vegetables, and clingfilm over the top.

Heading north to the market streets I found, instead of pancakes and cornflakes, banana fritters being served up in newspaper cones for breakfast. In the narrow lanes behind the tourist streets there are kitchens, just a shelf with a chopping board and a gas ring working from gas bottles tucked away underneath, where the chefs have to dodge little boys on bikes and smart suited ladies going to the office as well as their own waiters, always on the run.

Head further north, past the boat station and over the next khlong, and you're in a quiet neighbourhood of old houses, and schools, and one of the white-fronted houses hides a music school where students learn the Thai dulcimer and the rippling sound of hammers hitting brass strings shimmers through the neighbourhood.

A chubby middle aged woman brings her aged mother to the temple; mother is still wearing slippers. A Buddhist priest on his alms round shoves his bowl at me, and bursts out laughing when I'm not sure what to do.

***


Rothenburg ob der Tauber is one of those places that was always goig to be ruined by tourism. It's a small town, not much to it, easily swamped. It's on the 'Romantic Road', which means charabangs and tour groups and no one staying longer than two hours. It has an altarpiece by Tilman Riemenschneider (in fact, it has two), an artist who combined great skill and delicacy in woodcarving with a strikingly dramatic late Gothic sensibility; it has a double bridge over the river, the original town walls with their gates, unspoiled old houses.The main street is a scrum; tour groups marching behind their leaders from coach to church, from church to coach, selfie-taking en route, schnell, schnell, don't miss the tour, don't miss the bus.

Yet strangely, as soon as I got off the main road, I was on my own. A crisp, bright day, the snow lying virgin in the back gardens of the town; I got up on to the walls, and suddenly there was that soft silence you get when the snow absorbs all sound, except for the bok-bok-bok of a couple of chickens in a back yard and a dog that barked at me four or five times and then gave up. There were apple trees in back yards, branches black against the snow. There were views of red roofs and dark spires and half timber and stone, all the textures of the town. It takes a good hour or more to walk round, and in that time I saw three or four people.

It was a shock when I walked down a narrow, lonely alley, and came out at the end of it into the crowded press of bodies on the main street, and the noise, the yelling, the talking, the mobile phones, the trampling feet. 

Two worlds, meeting at a junction.

***
There are invisible walls in many museums and cathedrals, too. True, there are 'keep out' notices and chapels that are roped off, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about individual rooms in the British Museum which people don't bother with, because they're up too many stairs and don't have any of the big highlights in and don't have anything to do with ancient Egypt (because, let's face it, mummies are what people go for). The side chapels in Notre Dame cathedral with interesting tomb slabs and sculptures, but which are almost always deserted.

It's less and less easy these days to find 'unspoiled' or uncrowded places. But if you're alert to the existence of that invisible wall, you can sometimes find them in the most unpromising places.

Sparse culture vs rich culture

One of the things I most love about Ladakh is its sparse culture, the slenderness of its means.

Take the village economy. There are three trees, only three: the willow, the poplar, the apricot. The poplar for building. The willow for the roof, for hurdles, for sticks. The apricot for fruit.

There is one crop. Barley.

There are two toilets. Ladakhi toilets come in pairs; one for use this year, one for last year. At the end of its year fermenting, the compost is turned out in the fields, and the last year toilet becomes next year's.

This is sparse culture. It's not just the difficulty of the climate that makes it so; it's the predominance of a single religion, a single devotion (mahayana Buddhism has many deities but in all Ladakhi temples you see the same few - Green Tara, White Tara, Padmasambhava, Maitreya), a single way of life. (Though Leh is something of an exception: I met a number of local Sikhs, and stayed with a Muslim family, and in summer, anyway, the town is as much Kashmiri as it is Ladakhi.)

Music has only five instruments: the drum, cymbal, bell, the shawm and trumpet. Most music is sung: the ploughing song, the chant. A contrast to the richness of Varanasi, where bansuri, sitar, tabla, shehnai, violin and shruti box vary and ornament the two hundred different ragas, and the streets are full of diverse musics.

Iceland also has a sparse culture at its heart. Rich in stories - the Icelanders are great storytellers - but sparing in its food, for instance, sparing in the seasonality of its life, sparing in the lack of ancient history - though it has the oldest continually used Parliament site in the world, Iceland has hardly any buildings more than two hundred years old. Even its rifts, its mountains and its islands are recent, and not just in geological terms: Thingvellir subsided in the eighteenth century, so what you see now is not what the Vikings saw when they held their first parliament there, and the island of Surtsey is a mere half-century old.

The wonderful thing about Iceland, though, is that a sparse culture allows originality and eccentricity to develop easily. A ridiculously high number of Icelanders write and publish books. Bjork and Sigur Ros are just the tip of a huge Icelandic music iceberg. There are no traditions to hold you back.

Rich cultures, on the other hand, surround you with an amniotic soup of tradition, of culture, of music, of difference. This was the type of culture Shakespeare lived in - a mixup of Bible learning, classical myth and history, chivalrous romance, medieval devotion, modern science. While it's possible to maintain that the creator of Shylock probably never met a Jew - they had been barred from England for centuries - there was a Moroccan ambassador at the English court, and Elizabethan adventurers had reached Persia (Shirley), Surat (Coryat) and even Norwich (Will Kempe).

I was thinking of that today reading an article in the Guardian about Ethiopian music. With "80 ethnic groups and 40 native instruments" this is a rich culture - add to that modern tech and western musical beats, and you have something very massive and very rich.

Impermanence

Prayer flags at Pemayangtse, Sikkim

Western culture is all about making things permanent. We create monuments. We carve in stone, in Carrara marble. We build in brick and stone. Medieval masons built cathedrals that would last till Judgment Day. 

Buddhism on the other hand is about impermanence. All things change, perpetually. There is no 'I', there is no God, there is no-thing. Accepting that truth, the Buddhist can go through life unworried and serene. I'm hungry: it will pass. I'm ill: it will pass. I'm angry: it will pass.

Architecture, therefore, means a different thing in a Buddhist culture, and the religion expresses itself in ways that enshrine impermanence.

Prayer flags are left to decay; they tear and shred in the Himalayan winds, the fabric rots and crumbles.

Mud brick returns to earth. The stone buildings of Ladakh often seem as if they are returning to the mountain, or never left it; walls that sag, stones that fall from the dry-stone wall on to the path.

In Japan, the culture celebrates impermanence; viewing the cherry blossom, which is so beautiful because it lasts such a short time; the cult of wabi-sabi, the authenticity which comes with age and use - urushi lacquer that has worn thin, that shows the layers underneath, that develops depth as it ages and is handled.

There are temples of immemorial age, and which, even so, are barely two decades old, because they are rebuilt every twenty years, on the same design. What is new and what is old, in a world of impermanence, flows together and is confused.

(It's intriguing that the values of impermanence - the spontaneous, the limited-validity, the pop-up - are now being re-evaluated in architecture and town planning. We've had too many statement buildings, too many blocks of granite, glass and chrome. In reaction to this, the small-scale, the economic, the limited duration, have come to seem more attractive. But the philosophical underpinnings of Buddhism aren't there: this is more about Schumacher's 'small is beautiful', about self-help, grass-roots, anti-corporatism.)

So travelling in Buddhist cultures, I've found it's not just the forms of religion and its architecture that differ - stupas instead of steeples, butter lamps instead of candles. The whole intention of the architecture is different - the whole intention of the culture is different. You can look at a wheel and see a means of going somewhere very fast; or you can look at a wheel, and see a prayer made captive.

And the trumpets sounded on the other side

"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness," Keats wrote of autumn, and though by December the French countryside is bereft of fruitfulness, the mist is still here, close and grey and dampening.

At ten to eight in the morning our little group of walkers met by the mairie, under the stumpy pollards and the yellow glare of the streetlight. The forecast was not good; fog, fog, fog. There had been fog on the road driving into the village, so that we had to drive hard up against the verge, following the pale boundary of tarmac and withered grass in the headlights, and the mist seemed to be crystallising above the trees, so that the sky was hidden from us, and the world collapsed into a claustrophobic cocoon of grey.

We were paralysed. Should we set out, and risk motorway fog? Should we choose another walk? What would we do if it got worse? There was checking of forecasts, and checking of GPS, and swapping of mobile phone numbers, and no one was willing to risk saying yes or no. But in the end we went, as the mist lightened. Somewhere, but not here, the sun was shining; here, the mist was glowing, but it never cleared.

At Heurteauville nothing stirred. The bar windows were dusty, the doors firmly shut, a "for sale" notice barely visible in the dull light. The ramp down to the car ferry was empty; we could not see or hear the boat. Eventually, someone found out that we had arrived during the morning break in service. There was nothing to do but sit in the car, or pace the quayside trying to keep warm in the chill damp.

A boat passed. We heard the muffled growl of its engines long before it was visible, and the fog was so thick we couldn't see its whole length, only the blunt, dark prow cleaving the water, and then the long dark line of its side, and then silence, except for the slap of its wake against the concrete landing ramp.

We waited. A single light shone faintly far off, a pallid yellow that stained the white of the fog. I say 'far off'; it felt very distant, but we had no way of telling how far. At last we heard the chug of a motor, and the light divided; a light on the far quay, and a light on the ferry, that angled its way across the current towards us. (And that current was fast, and swirling, and evil.)

We drove through Jumieges, past the two great towers of the ruined abbey barely visible behind high walls; we turned up from the river road into the hills, and parked where a green lane ran off into the forest. Dull red cows turned to look at us, then lowered their heads again to the dank grass.

Mist in a forest is lovely. It turns everything to Japanese calligraphy or sumi-e, with blurred silhouettes and a muted palette of greys and browns, like sepia brushed on to slightly wet paper.


The nearest trees stood dark against the low sun; but further off, the serried trunks faded into grey, and only a sudden blaze of russet bracken enlivened the scene.

In the heart of the forest stands a small chapel, by a junction of grassy ways. Generations of passers-by have cut their initials on the soft chalky stone of the walls; inside, two shelves carried religious statuettes with all the banality of a small collection of garden gnomes or a lifetime's supply of souvenirs from Great Yarmouth. The square stone reservoir close by was almost empty; a single walking boot balanced precariously on its rim.

We came down eventually out of the forest, and on to the road that runs straight as an arrow along the bank of the river, turning back toward where we'd started. The other bank of the Seine was invisible; it was as if we were walking along the edge of the known world. Above us, white chalk cliffs were topped by dark grey trees, dissolving into the mist.

Down in the fields below the cliff, a single tree stood out, its huge limp leaves yellow in the grey. Dogs raced through a field towards us, barking. We'd stuck together in the woods, but now we were strung out along the road, one or two striding out way in front, others dawdling to take pictures, or chatting, or simply trudging along the tarmac. Cars whipped past, headlghts still on at one in the afternoon. In one of the orchards by the road stood a tiny  derelict half-timbered house where a wicked fairy must have lived, surrounded by stunted and lightning-blasted trees and tangles of briar.

A boat passed us, quite invisible in the mist. The sun shone straight ahead of us, diffusing its light through the banks of low cloud and fog. One one side the fields and cliffs and forest, on the other side of the concrete wall with its iron bollards, nothing but the sound of the boat's engines, the wake slapping the shore, a couple of swans in the shallow water. A solitary navigation lamp on its concrete pillar would have made a fine vantage point, had there been anything to see, but the ladder up to the top was missing, and the light was off.

After lunch, in a restaurant just off the main road, in a low, slanted room under heavy oak beams - and a good lunch it was, too - the path headed back up, zigzagging up the cliff through damp ferns and over slushy fallen leaves. The mist was finally beginning to clear; rays of sun slashed through the forest, cold light in our eyes, and suddenly the bracken was aflame with colour. As we came down to the village of Le Mesnil sous Jumieges, the sky cleared, to a deep, clear blue shot through with crinkled contrails and sharp edges of cloud; yet down in the valley, the Seine was still hidden by drifting mists.

In one of the orchards here, a drift of drying, brown apples surrounded a leafless tree; here in Normandy the trees are still ancient, high trees for the most part, not the low-slung trees preferred where mechanical pickers are used, and many of the farms still make traditional cider.

This was an atmospheric day; our risk ofthe morning had turned out well. We strode on, past Saint-Philibert's church, past Agnes Sorel's manor, with its fine Gothic window and a small wellhouse, on through open fields and orchards and past incurious cows and bedraggled horses, and as we did, the day delivered its final surprise, a sunset of
velvety texture and impressive fieriness that glowed like embers under the soft grey roiling of high cloud.

Getting the right kind of traveller

I've just been reading Mike Harding's Footloose in the Himalayas. It's an interesting book, and both livelier and more observant than I'd expected - Harding has a great eye for detail and a feel for the mot juste. (He also knows how to operate a running gag over twenty or thirty pages, which enlivens things no end.)

Meeting local people half way up the road to the Shingo La, he mentions his uneasiness about taking photographs; treating people as 'sights' feels wrong. That leads to thoughts about the difference between travellers and tourists, which, in the end, he puts down to this; the traveller lives with the people he meets, for however long he's there, while the tourist surrounds himself with comfort and privilege. (Of course Harding, though wanting to be a 'traveller', does have certain comforts and privileges, a cook and a ponyman, for instance... but his point is a valid one.)

Mass tourism can be a curse. It puts pressure on local resources, it falsifies human relationships, it poisons everything. It can remodel entire villages as Backpacker Central, where nothing is available but the 'planned experience' and the generic hippy market selling sandalwood incense, Shiva shirts and leggings with elephants on.

Some countries and cities deal with this by a financial bar. Most overt is Bhutan's spending barrier of $200 or more a day. That's meant to discourange "the wrong kind of tourist". Other countries develop only higher-class accommodation, barring anyone who can't afford to stay in a four star hotel for two weeks.

Actually, they haven't necessarily got the right kind of tourist. They've just made sure they make more money out of the ones they get.

Let me suggest another option. Have a special class of visa for long term travellers: a compulsory three month visa. In other words, a visa only for travellers who are going to stay a full three months. (Obviously you'd need get-out clauses for such events as a death in the family, or serious illness.)

That gets rid of all the 'Spring Break' element. It gets rid of most of the package-tour people who only do day trips. The people who are going to spend three months in a single country (okay, with the exception of India, which is half a world in itself) are those who will become a temporary part of the local scene: people who are going to settle in a bit. People who may not be wealthy, but who have time.

People who aren't going to rush from World Heritage Site to World Heritage Site, but are going to spend some time staying in small towns, looking at out-of-the-way temples, doing the little hikes that most people don't bother with. People who are going to learn how to play karrom, or help cook in a Buddhist monastery, or spend six hours on the back of a motorbike to get somewhere they really want to go.

And probably, over those three months, they'll spend about what your $200 a day tourist does in a couple of weeks. But that isn't really the point.

"Destination" hotels

I read a travel piece in one of the Sunday papers recently. It told me all about a destination. The best hotels. The best budget hotels, indeed, except that when I say 'budget' I mean 300 rupees a night (about £3) and they mean £150 and up. The best cafes and bars. The best restaurants. The best shops.

No museums. Nowhere to walk. No gardens, no churches, no monuments, no history. I ended the piece wondering why on earth I would go there. Just for shopping, eating, and drinking coffee? (Even if it was a damn fine cup of coffee...)

The "destination hotel" is perhaps my worst nightmare. Going to a place just in order to sit in a room. Admittedly I've stayed in and used some lovely hotels in my time. One favourite: The Crillon, Paris, for the amazing waiter service; a table of five is served, all the plates covered by silver lids - and hey presto! all at once, all five covers are lifted to expose the magic of the cuisine. A masterclass in how seriously the French take their food. Another: The UN Plaza (as was), New York. Nowhere else have I been able to swim and look down 30 floors on to the gridded streets of the city; surreal, wonderful, and very Manhattan.

But I go somewhere because of its flavour. I go to see the landscape, to see the crowd, to see the history. A recent walk beside the Gironde delivered tiny fossils in the chalk, fishermens' cabins on stilts, a lonely Romanesque church on a headland over the grey waters. Yes, we also stayed in a lovely B&B, but that wasn't the point.

I travel to find surprises. A fossilised leaf in the rock at my feet, just exposed by the low tide. Or in Bangkok, a while ago, a group of graffiti artists working on a commission to jolly up a food kiosk and its alleyway, or ladies cooking the monks' breakfast at a local temple. The hammer dulcimer class I was invited to join in Chiangmai. My first taste of vin de noix in a little hotel in Conques, on the way to Santiago de Compostela (years later, I've found the recipe, and make six litres, religiously, every year). A "destination hotel" doesn't deliver surprises.

So, why destination hotels? How cynical do I want to be? First, because travel sections of newspapers now aim to deliver nice easy experiences that everyone can have. (Well, everyone with a rather large amount of money to spend, anyway.) "Our readers don't want to have their minds opened. They don't want to know about the challenges of farming in the high altitude deserts of Ladakh, or the aesthetics of Japanese calligraphy. They want to know where to spend £500 for a weekend break. They don't want surprises. They want two good meals a day, a nightclub that's edgy, and a room that's guaranteed to be on-trend."

And secondly... because I suppose some people really do want to play it safe.

There is nothing there at all

I'm a great lover of nothing. The wonderful nothing that you get in the middle of the Fens, when all there is to see is the immense sky with its moods, its shifting or scudding clouds, bright blue in the sun, or with the chiaroscuro of a rainstorm's black massif set off by slanting rays of light. Or the nothing of Wahiba Sands, nothing and nothing and nothing but rolling dunes as far as you can see, which from the top of a dune is a long way, and from the bottom, only a hundred yards.

"Move along there now, nothing to see here! nothing to see here!" - as soon as someone says that you instantly think: hang on, there's something interesting here!

All this by way of introduction to a piece of sheer poetry on the Vagabonding blog. The red heart of Australia, where there really is. Nothing. At. All. To. See.